Positioned within the wider political, socioeconomic and cultural
context of contemporary India’s regressive and anti-feminist
trajectory, this article examines the ‘Indian manosphere’ and how
it contributes towards the Hindutva digital subjectivation of
young men – a pedagogical process that shapes their
understanding of self, identity, history, and future aspirations. We
propose that the overlapping pedagogies explored in this article
engender assumptions about historic and ongoing Hindu
victimhood, Hindu civilizational supremacy, and a reimagination of
India (and Indianness) through a neoliberal emphasis on
entrepreneurship and technological innovation. We map out three
distinct but overlapping subjectivation pedagogies: a superiority
affirming pedagogy; a pedagogy of self-reliance; and a (neo)liberal
Hindutva pedagogy. Via critical discourse analysis, we then show
how the three pedagogies are deployed by three types of
misogynistic Indian ‘manfluencer’: the entrepreneurial misogynist,
the vigilant misogynist and the ‘liberal’ Hindu misogynist. These
pedagogies of Hindutva digital subjectivation ultimately serve to
construct a ‘new’ story about India and Indians that breaks away
from its post-colonial Third world identity, and moves towards a
neoliberal Hindu supremacist authoritarianism. Finally, we argue
that the Indian manosphere’s pedagogical reshaping of young
men enables India’s slide towards authoritarianism by re-packaging
it as a story of national re-renewal.